A new push to purge Florida voter rolls

Secretary of State Ken Detzner will meet with area elections supervisors and local citizens to talk about “Project Integrity,” which is aimed at identifying and removing ineligible voters from the rolls. The two-hour meeting will be hosted by Sarasota Elections Supervisor Kathy Dent.

Project Integrity follows a controversial effort by Gov. Rick Scott's administration to purge noncitizens from the voter rolls before the 2012 elections. But that move was widely condemned and proved highly ineffective.

In hearings in Panama City and Jacksonville last week, Detzner pledged the new purge effort will be more methodical, with the state providing documentation on each voter whose status is in doubt. But ultimately it will be up to the local elections supervisors to decide whether to remove the voters from the rolls.

“Through transparency and the statutory due process protection afforded to every voter, we can ensure the continued integrity of our voter rolls while protecting the voting rights of eligible voters from those who may cast an illegal vote,” Detzner said last month in announcing the hearings in five cities, which will conclude Wednesday in Fort Lauderdale.

In the 2012 purge, state officials initially used driver's license information from the state Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles to come up with a list of some 180,000 noncitizens on the voting rolls. But the information turned out to be highly inaccurate, in part, because the records did not reflect voters who had become naturalized citizens.

That list was eventually reduced to 2,600 and then sent to the local supervisors of elections, who generally shunned it because of more inaccuracies. An analysis by the Miami Herald showed nearly six of every 10 voters on the list were Hispanics.

Using federal data, the state sent a final list of some 200 ineligible voters, although the purge was halted after voting rights groups filed a lawsuit.

This time the state, through an agreement with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, will use the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database to look for noncitizens on the voting rolls. The SAVE database is normally used to verify the immigration status of people applying for federal or state aid.

But questions about the accuracy of the citizenship information on SAVE database, as well as issues about the cost of documenting noncitizens for the local supervisors of elections, have been raised in the initial hearings on Project Integrity.

And the new purge is drawing sharp criticism from Democrats, who say there is no evidence of any widespread numbers of ineligible voters in the state. They allege that there is a political motivation behind the purge from Scott, who is seeking re-election next year.

“Now, unbelievably, Rick Scott is at it again,” the South Florida congresswoman said last week. “With his re-election on the horizon, the governor is asking voters to take his word for it that this time there's no political motivation behind his attempt to purge voters.”

Detzner defended the renewed effort to remove noncitizens from the voting rolls in the first hearing in Panama City.

“I have not run across a single Floridian who is eligible to vote who thinks we should keep people on the rolls who are ineligible, to dilute their votes,” Detzner said.